Algorithms are processes that produce encryption for secure message transmission. RSA and PKC are popular encryption systems with two keys, invented by MIT and Stanford University researchers. PKC uses the RSA algorithm to encrypt messages with a public key and decrypt with a private key.
The word algorithm is believed to be a variant of algorism, which refers to Arabic numerals and comes from the surname of an Arab mathematician named Muhammad ibn-Musa al-Khwarizmi. In cryptography, an algorithm is a process or procedure which, when followed, produces a particular type of encryption and may be referred to as an encryption algorithm. Message encryption is the key to secure message transmission over the Internet. There are several encryption algorithms, including Rijndael, MARS, RC6, Serpent, and Twofish, all of which are presented as candidates for the Advanced Encryption Standard (AES), which is used for secure communications on the Internet. The RSA algorithm is another encryption algorithm, employed in another encryption system used on the Internet, especially for e-mail.
Ronald L. Rivest, Adi Shamir, and Leonard M. Adleman, MIT faculty members, invented the Rivest-Shamir-Adleman algorithm – popularly known as the RSA algorithm using the first letter of each of their last names – in 1977. The RSA L he algorithm was used in the public key cryptography system, also known as public key cryptography or PKC. Encryption systems can have one or two keys. The PKC is an asymmetric cryptographic system, which means it has two keys.
Although previously known by the United States National Security Agency, public key cryptography was invented and released separately in 1976 by Whitfield Diffie of Sun Microsystems® and Martin Hellman of Stanford University. They found a way to avoid the sender having to include the encryption key in the message, as is required in symmetric key cryptography. This was a big step forward, because sending the key with the message increased the risk of possible interception and decryption. As of March 2010, a claim surfaced that computer scientists at the University of Michigan had cracked the RSA algorithm, but it was also pointed out that the method depends on tampering with the computer, not understanding how to decrypt any message in any time from anywhere in the world.
The PKC system works in stages. First, the sender’s computer asks the recipient’s computer to provide its public key. If it replies, the recipient’s public key, created by the RSA algorithm, is used to encrypt the message. Then the message is sent and when the recipient’s computer receives the message, the recipient’s private key is used to decrypt the message. Since there are two keys, an intercepted or hijacked message is secure because it cannot be decrypted without the key.
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